Technology, Drama, the Market, and I

August 02, 2009

Nano-Blogging: When Micro is Not Micro Enough

Nano-blogging makes micro-blogging soooo long-form. If Flutter were real (and not a spoof, see the video below from earlier this year), it would allow only 26 characters, and (the supposedly real) Adocu is even more extreme: You have only one word. Hemingway would love this, although he was less economical. Remember his six-word story "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"?

It's hard to tell what's a joke and what's not these days but Twitter has told us a great lesson: Chances are that what may seem like a satire at first, can soon be our new reality.

We know that the short form flourishes in the Long Tail. And we also know that the best way to create a compelling story is to come up with one that is hard to believe. Sites like Flutter and Adocu combine both axioms and show that short and extreme - extreme as in "is that real?" - creates maximum attention in the age of short-attention.